Tautological characteristic classes III: the Witt class for PSL(2)
We explain the relation between the Witt class and the universal equicommutative class for PSL(2,K). We discuss an analogue of the Milnor-Wood inequality.
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Publications and source records attributed to Jan Dymara.
We explain the relation between the Witt class and the universal equicommutative class for PSL(2,K). We discuss an analogue of the Milnor-Wood inequality.
Let $K$ be an arbitrary infinite field. The cohomology group $H^2(SL(2,K), H_2\,SL(2,K))$ contains the class of the universal central extension. When studying representations of fundamental groups of surfaces in $SL(2,K)$ it is useful to have classes stable under deformations (Fenchel--Nielsen twists) of representations. We identify the maximal quotient of the universal class which is stable under twists as the Witt class of Nekovar. The Milnor--Wood inequality asserts that an $SL(2,{\bf R})$-bundle over a surface of genus $g$ admits a flat structure if and only if its Euler number is $\leq (g-1)$. We establish an analog of this inequality, and a saturation result for the Witt class. The result is sharp for the field of rationals, but not sharp in general.
We discuss the formalism of tautological characteristic classes of flat bundles. Applied to $PSL(2,K)$ it yields the Witt class of Nekovar. Applied to $PGL_+(2n,K)$, the general linear groups with positive determinant over an arbitrary ordered field, it yields (a generalization of) the Euler class.
Several classical formulae for the growth series of a Coxeter group are proved in a new way, using the structure of the Coxeter complex, the Davis complex, or the Tits non-complex.
We study the unitary boundary representation of a strongly transitive group acting on a right-angled hyperbolic building. We show its irreducibility. We do so by associating to such a representation a representation of a certain Hecke algebra, which is a deformation of the classical representation of a hyperbolic reflection group. We show that the associated Hecke algebra representation is irreducible.
For any Coxeter group W, we define a filtration of H^*(W;ZW) by W-submodules and then compute the associated graded terms. More generally, if U is a CW complex on which W acts as a reflection group we compute the associated graded terms for H_*(U) and, in the case where the action is proper and cocompact, for H^*_c(U).
Let X be a building of uniform thickness q+1. L^2-Betti numbers of X are reinterpreted as von-Neumann dimensions of weighted L^2-cohomology of the underlying Coxeter group. The dimension is measured with the help of the Hecke algebra. The weight depends on the thickness q. The weighted cohomology makes sense for all real positive values of q, and is computed for small q. If the Davis complex of the Coxeter group is a manifold, a version of Poincare duality allows to deduce that the L^2-cohomology of a building with large thickness is concentrated in the top dimension.
In this note, we show that the asymptotic dimension of any building is finite and equal to the asymptotic dimension of an apartment in that building.
We compute the compactly supported cohomology of the standard realization of any locally finite building.
We prove that the boundary of a right-angled hyperbolic building is a universal Menger space. Corollary: the 3-dimensional universal Menger space is the boundary of some Gromov-hyperbolic group.
The group of simplicial automorphisms of a Tits-Kac-Moody ininite building of thickness q associated to a cocompact reflexion group with fundamental domain a simplex, is Kazhdan for q sufficiently large. Thus we obtain families of new Kazhdan groups: two in dimension 3 and one in dimension 4. The proof uses continuos cohomology, in particular a lemma of Borel-Wallach, and Garland's vanishing method.